Slavery and Genovese's Delusions Manuel Yang Bad Subjects, Issue # 69, June 2004
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Nowhere has this notion of "slavery" been more woefully mystified than in the domain of US historical scholarship.
Genovese and Slaveocracy
One of the prime sources of this mystification is Eugene D. Genovese, once a leading Marxist historian of U.S. plantation slavery and now a neoconservative, Catholic curmudgeon in the Culture Wars, a man who appears to have traversed the path of apostasy as readily as the previous generation of ex-Communists. Genovese impressively overthrew many existing assumptions within U.S. slave historiography, only to replace them with dissimulations and distortions that were yet another set of theological postulates in the name of Marxism. In The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), he wrote that the Southern slave "planters were not mere capitalists; they were precapitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners who had to adjust their economy and ways of thinking to a capitalist world market" and this quasi-aristocratic, landowning tradition "developed neither a strange form of capitalism nor an undefinable agrarianism but a special civilization built on the relationship of master to slave," a civilization that, "in its spirit and fundamental direction, represented the antithesis of capitalism, however many compromises it had to make."
Hence the nineteenth-century struggle between the North and South in the US Civil War (which Genovese insistently dubs "the War for Southern Independence") was a clash of two civilizations, the Northern bourgeois one of market-based industrial capitalism and the Southern one of slaveholding landowners. Genovese has gone so far as to say that the latter civilization, at its best, "constituted a rejection of the crass, vulgar, inhumane elements of capitalist society," refusing social relations based on the cash nexus, and, "given their sense of honor, were prepared to defend [their ideals] at all cost." Indeed, "The planters, in truth, grew into the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic."
This Genovesean thesis is not far removed from the fetishism of categories that Marx decried in his attack on bourgeois political economy, that secular theology of the capitalist class (note that the title of his book is not the Critique of the Political Economy of Slavery). One of the central features of theology is that it mistakes appearance for the essence of things. Hence seeing the appearance of perfected humanity in God, capitalism, or socialism, as well as the appearance of embryonic capitalist relations in all forms of society throughout history, are manifest examples of theological thought. When Genovese calls the US Southern slave planters "the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic," he mistakes the appearance of aristocratic ideology and mores for the essence of the historical, social relations that defined the plantation system.
However diverse and conflicting the cultural practices among the various sectors of the ruling class or multifarious the forms of slavery (whether waged or unwaged, free or chattel, urban or industrial) existing in a bourgeois republic, the bourgeois republic remains unflinchingly bourgeois. The Japanese ruling class put the emperor more centrally in their state ideology and nationalist culture in 1868-1945 than in the previous three hundred years of militarist feudalism under Tokugawa hegemony. Did that make modern Japan more feudal or, at least, semi-feudal, as some the Koza School Marxists claimed? Had England been a species of feudal, monarchical capitalism because it never abolished the peerage and its polite culture of deference remained intact?
Genovese has sufficient historical sense to qualify the judgment that the planters were "the closest things to feudal lords" by noting: "In arguing that their system was neither bourgeois nor seigneurial but a unique socioeconomic formation, we are delineating the special qualities of a particular ruling class within a larger international capitalist mode of production. But those special qualities define the kind of marginal difference which periodically has sent social classes and peoples off to slaughter one another." It is such "marginal difference" among the ruling classes of the world capitalist system that have engulfed the globe in world wars and imperialist bloodbath, such as the one taking place today in Iraq. Furthermore, because there is no such thing as a pure capitalism or seigneurialism, to call the Southern plantation system "a unique socioeconomic formation" is a moot point, for that is the case with all historical, regionally specific forms of seigneurial or capitalist systems.
And how does Genovese define capitalism? Declaring that he follows the definition of Karl Marx and Maurice Dobb, Genovese says it is "the mode of production characterized by wage labor and the separation of the labor force from the means of production — that is, as the mode in which labor power itself has become a commodity."
In 1881 Marx warned Vera Zasulich that the analysis of expropriation of agricultural producers — which laid the basis of capitalism — he made in Capital was "expressly confined to the countries of Western Europe," not to be applied willy-nilly to other regions of the world, and Dobb's own discussion in Studies in the Development of Capitalism focused specifically on West European capitalist development, particularly England. What Genovese has done in his definition is what Marx said his Russian critic Nicolai K. Mikhailovsi did to his work: "He must by all means transform my historical sketch of the development of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of universal development predetermined by fate for all nations, whatever their historic circumstances in which they find themselves may be. . .But I beg his pardon. (That [view] does me at the same time too much honor and too much insult.)"
As crucially important as the wage-form is in the formation of historical capitalism, this is not what makes capitalism what it is; rather, it is the historical process of what Marx mentions here and calls elsewhere primary or primitive accumulation, namely the expropriation and enclosure of the commons and forcible proletarianization of the expropriated, that is, their entire lives condemned to the systematic, generalized imposition of work. When the African commoners were hunted in their native lands, divorced from their respective customary means of subsistence and production, sold into slavery, and transported through the Middle Passage into the "New World," they suffered primary accumulation; when those who survived that harrowing journey were forced to work as slaves on the plantation, whose organizational form and labor-process in many ways prefigured the labor discipline and exploitation of the industrial factory, they were made into proletarians forced to create surplus value for their plantation masters. This is why Marx wrote in Part VIII of Vol. 1 of Capital: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production" and "In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal."
full: http://eserver.org/bs/69/yang.html
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